Tuesday 11 October 2011 15.53 EDT
First published on Tuesday 11 October 2011 15.53 EDT

The Shangri-La hotel, with its five-star facilities, rooftop swimming pool and £350-a-night rooms, is not the kind of place where anyone on a tight or even moderate budget would stay. Even a pot of tea comes in at over £5 and an expense account would seem essential to all but the richest business traveller.

But this is where Adam Werritty checked in on at least one trip to Dubai this year when travelling, in the words of the Ministry of Defence, "in a private capacity". And travelling in a private capacity is what the MoD says the close friend and best man of the defence secretary, Liam Fox, has been doing when he has shown up again and again, all around the world, at the side of the defence secretary over the past 18 months.

Werritty's movements have led to a growing sense of mystery about where he has been getting the money to travel the world, often to the same places as Fox and in comfortable style. Since Fox took office Werritty has been to Florida, Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Washington, Singapore, Israel and Spain, each time meeting the secretary of state for defence – 19 trips in total in which he saw Fox.

Details about where his money comes from are scant. Over a four-year period he appears to have been paid £90,000 in salary for his role as executive director of Fox's charity Atlantic Bridge. But that is now defunct, closed down following a Charity Commission investigation.

Accounts filed at the Charity Commission show that in 2008 and 2009 alone the organisation spent more than £15,000 on travel, although that would not necessarily relate to Werritty alone.

Certainly, hotel records at the Shangri-La in Dubai seen by the Guardian name the charity as the "company" under which he booked in, but hotel staff could not confirm if the charity had paid.

Either way the record showed Werritty certainly spared no expense, selecting one of the more expensive suites in an already expensive hotel. He took a "Horizon deluxe" room on the 40th floor of the hotel in downtown Dubai, one level below the business lounge where Fox met defence industry businessman Harvey Boulter on 18 June in a meeting brokered by Werritty to discuss a possible defence contract and a legal battle involving the MoD.

The room currently costs £320 per night, which means Werritty was spending the same for his room as the records showed Fox did in his rather more elevated capacity as defence secretary when he stayed in the hotel in April.

The 41st floor Horizon business lounge is a good place to conduct business. Screened booths fitted with leather sofas are accessed via a manned reception desk and staff take their duty to keep the area exclusive seriously, repeatedly demanding your room number if you wander in for a look.

It also emerged yesterday that a pro-Israeli lobbying organisation, Bicom, paid for Werritty's flight and hotel bill to attend a conference in Israel in 2009 where he was asked to join a panel and talk about Iran. The Herzliya conference was one of the events listed by the Ministry of Defence at which he met Fox.

Amid questions as to whether Werritty has been earning money off the back of his access to and relationship with Fox, the defence secretary has said Werritty "has a very wide range of long-standing business, international relations and political links of his own". Werritty's name appears at Companies House with two firms, Danscotia Consulting and Todhia Ltd, but it is unclear what either of them do.

It is likely that the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, who interviewed Werritty on Tuesday, will have wanted to know what his business and political relations are. Werritty has so far not made any public statements.

Pressed to say in the Commons on Monday if Werritty had received cash from clients due to his access to Fox, the defence secretary said: "When it comes to the pecuniary interests of Mr Werritty in those conferences, I am absolutely confident he was not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income."

It seems Werritty also chose to eat in one of Dubai's more expensive restaurants. Boulter said he bumped into him in June, the night before he met Fox for the meeting in the Horizon business lounge that sparked the whole Werritty/ Fox scandal. Werritty was dining at Ruth's Chris American steakhouse. It is the kind of eaterie that attracts people who prize flavour over economy; fillet steaks sell for £50 each and Maine Lobster goes for even more. To uncork the most expensive wine, a 1996 Chateau Cheval Blanc from Bordeaux, you need at least £3,000, though there is no suggestion Werritty placed an order.

Air fares

Adam Werritty is known to have made 18 trips abroad over 14 months where Liam Fox was present but the question of how he paid for most of them remains a mystery. Travelling business class, those flights would have cost the 33-year-old more than £38,000, according to Guardian estimates. Assuming Werritty paid for his own accommodation in five-star hotels the estimated 83 nights away could have cost up to another £16,000.

Even if he had just stayed one night at each destination, then the total cost of the trips would have reached £40,132.